Biography

‘An excellent orator, a great lawyer, and an ornament to his profession’, Glanville was born at Tavistock. According to an anecdote attributable to his pupil Matthew Hale†, his father John designated him as his heir, in preference to his elder brother Francis*, but once in possession of this inheritance Glanville chose to renounce it. However, as Francis was acknowledged as heir by the Crown while both brothers were still minors, the story’s accuracy may be doubted. The farm and two old houses at Tavistock that Glanville owned subsequently perhaps represented a smaller patrimony.22 As a student at Lincoln’s Inn, Glanville made good use of the notes left him by his father, and became ‘a great proficient’. Called to the bar in 1610, he rapidly built up a practice in the West Country. Retained by Liskeard, doubtless through the influence of the borough’s recorder, Sir William Godolphin*, his mother’s stepson, he himself shortly afterwards became recorder of Okehampton, around 14 miles from Tavistock. He also found time to write poetry, contributing a verse to William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals in 1613, and later composing paraphrases of the psalms.23

Godolphin died before the 1614 general election, but Glanville obtained a seat at Liskeard on his own account. He was joined at Westminster by his brother Francis. The records of this assembly rarely distinguish between the two men, but in subsequent Parliaments Glanville greatly outshone his elder sibling, and he seems to have done so on this occasion. Appointed by full name to legislative committees to consider extortions by customs officials, and the personal estates of Sir Edward Herne and Sir Robert Wroth (20 and 25 May), he was presumably also nominated to two other private bill committees relating to a Chancery decree and a Crown grant. A fifth, to which he was named as a Cornish burgess, concerned the lands of his kinsman Sir Warwick Hele*, and having called on 17 May for this measure to be committed, he reported it to the House seven days later. Always a willing advocate of West Country concerns, it was most likely he who spoke on 21 May in favour of the bill for a new pier at Axmouth, Devon, a measure which he supported partly because its promoter, Sir Walter Earle*, had resorted to Parliament rather than to patent. A speech on 19 May observing that Chancery did not concern itself with actions of £10 or less is certainly attributable to him, which means that he was also added that day to the committee for the small debts bill.24

It is unclear which Glanville brother called on 7 May for the Sabbath observance bill to include a clause on football. However, more overtly political and constitutional issues were almost invariably the preserve of this Member. A speech on 10 May agreeing that Sir Thomas Parry* should come to the bar of the House to explain his involvement in the Stockbridge election was probably his first venture into the realm of parliamentary procedure. Much more controversially, on 23 May he questioned the legality of James I’s new order of baronets, arguing that all estates of inheritance must be tied to specific properties, and he was named to the committee to examine a petition on the subject.25 On 25 May he backed the strategy of proceeding against Bishop Neile on the basis of common fame, arguing that a complaint to the Lords was likely to establish the truth, and asserting that if the bishop’s alleged attack on the Commons were substantiated, then he hated him ‘as the devil’. Added two days later to the committee to redraft the relevant message to the Upper House, he responded defiantly on 30 May to the king’s instruction for the Commons to resume normal business, insisting that the suspension should continue until the Lords responded over Neile. Although he reluctantly accepted the bishop’s excuse that his remarks had been misinterpreted, acknowledging that his personal intentions were ‘by law not examinable’, on the same day he eagerly embraced the alternative strategy of petitioning the king over claims that Neile had certified a recusant as conformable on inadequate grounds (1 June). In this instance he considered that it was up to the bishop to prove that he had fulfilled his responsibilities (3 June). Failing to take seriously James’s growing impatience over the lack of progress on supply, on 7 June he half-heartedly supported committing the subsidy bill, but dismissed the king’s threat to dissolve Parliament as ‘a needless fear’. Within hours he was proved wrong.26

Glanville was employed by Plymouth corporation as early as 1615, securing a retainer two years later and replacing Sir William Strode* as recorder in 1620. However, he also started to make his mark in London, and was reported as counsel in King’s Bench in 1617. In the following year he was granted in reversion the prothonotaryship of Chancery, which in due course he would execute in trust for the widow of Sir George Carew II*. Although he probably owed this appointment to his kinsman Sir Francis Godolphin*, one of the current holders, his selection again bore testimony to his growing reputation in the West Country.27

Glanville secured a seat at Plymouth in the 1620 general election, despite competition from Edward Salter*, the nominee of Prince Charles’s Council, and indeed he represented the borough in Parliament throughout the following decade.28 During the first sitting of 1621, it is again difficult to distinguish him from his brother Francis, who may, for example, have been the Member who gave evidence during the inquiry into Clement Coke’s* assault on Sir Charles Morrison* (8-9 May).29 However, in most instances the evidence once more suggests that Glanville himself was the more active Member, making around 70 speeches and receiving nominations to over 40 committees or conferences. Naturally his experience as a lawyer influenced his priorities and attitudes. On 20 Feb., during a debate on the bill to limit suits in courts of equity, he approvingly quoted a saying of the lord chancellor, Sir Francis Bacon*, ‘that it was the best law that leaves least to the judge and the best judge that leaves least to himself’. A firm believer in the essential soundness of the judicial and administrative framework within which he earned his livelihood, Glanville was a constant critic of attempts to abuse or distort the system at any level. On 17 Feb. his target was thefeodaries and escheators who manipulated local juries in pursuit of a favourable verdict, while on 14 Mar. he upset solicitor-general Heath with a scathing attack on debtors who abused the terms of royal protection from prosecution. Indeed, so careful was he of correct procedure that, having helped prompt a major government concession, a Proclamation against the misuse of protections and bills of conformity, he backed Noye’s call for it to include a proviso explaining that special circumstances justified this unaccustomed use of the prerogative to overturn Chancery decrees (23 March). Three days later, he was named to the committee to finalize the Proclamation’s text.30 Glanville had already introduced a bill on 27 Feb. to prevent the Crown’s authority being misappropriated to help commoners recover their own debts, though this failed to re-emerge from its committee stage. Such was his growing reputation in the House that he was appointed to prepare for and manage the second conference with the Lords about the bill against informers (21 and 25 Apr.), and to draft bills against bribery in the courts, the sale of official posts, and the establishment of new offices (22 Mar., 27 Apr., 3 May).31 However, he also had some sense of Parliament’s limitations as a vehicle of reform. He firmly believed that the bill to punish abuses in procuring process out of the Westminster courts would actually be counterproductive, though his views were overruled (1 March). He noted on 27 Apr. that the Chancery masters had continued to demand higher fees despite this practice being condemned by the Commons as a grievance. One of the committee appointed on 14 Feb. to investigate the mistreatment of prisoners in the Fleet, he advised Members on 2 June against issuing an order about this issue that they would subsequently be unable to enforce: ‘let us only express it as our opinion and not thrust ourselves desperately upon a rock’. On the same day, with the end of the sitting imminent, he and Hakewill accordingly drafted a declaration setting out their views on the future management of the prison, which the warden was then enjoined to follow.32

Compared with many lawyers in the House, Glanville took relatively little interest in private legislation. He was the first Member named to the committee stage of the bill to confirm a Suffolk manor to Thomas Waller (27 Apr.), and was a teller for the noes on 29 May, when the Commons voted on whether to continue with a bill promoted by the earl of Holdernesse. However, his principal concern was again the measure to allow Sir Warwick Hele to make leases. Having spoken in the bill’s favour on 28 Feb., he chaired the committee, but the legislation was controversial, as it offered greater security to Hele’s tenants at the expense of his heirs’ rights, and Glanville twice reported the bill before the House agreed to have it engrossed (10 and 26 March). It failed to secure a third reading.33

In a sense the Hele bill was an extension of Glanville’s interest in West Country issues. Many of the economic issues which drew his attention related to Devon and the neighbouring counties. On 28 Feb. he expressed concern that the bill for duchy of Cornwall leases failed to allow for periods when there was no duke. He chaired the legislative committees concerned with the manufacture of wool-cards and the transportation of Welsh butter, which he reported on 26 Mar., 27 Apr. and 28 May. He was also once again named to the committee stage of the bill against exactions of customs officials, a Plymouth priority given the abuses committed there by James Bagg I*.34 On at least two other issues, Glanville also doubtless acted as his constituents’ spokesman. Discussing on 26 Feb. the bill against tithes levied on fishing voyages, he emphasized that this was a port town problem, communicated to him by poor fishermen, and drew on the experience of the Newfoundland fleets for evidence that such tithes were a recent innovation. Although not the original chairman of the bill’s committee stage, he reported the measure on 1 Mar. when Sir Thomas Roe was taken ill. The bill’s geographical scope proved contentious, and it was recommitted, though Glanville persuaded the House to pass it for engrossing when he reported it a second time on 28 May. By now he had already launched a campaign that would occupy him for the rest of the decade, on 17 Apr. preferring a bill for free fishing in America. Eight days later, during the second reading debate, Sir Edwin Sandys explained that the New England Company, led by Sir Ferdinando Gorges†, the governor of Plymouth fort, was seeking to establish a monopoly over new fishing grounds off the New England coast. Glanville then outlined some of the local difficulties experienced by rival fishermen, presumably drawing on first-hand accounts, and was duly named to the committee as a port town burgess. However, the bill proceeded no further during this sitting.35

Glanville’s opposition to the New England Company’s behaviour was just one example of his entrenched hostility to patentees in general. During his lengthy speech of 6 Feb. on the likely causes of the prevailing shortage of coin, he homed in on the activities of the East India Company, which he accused of diverting bullion for its own advantage. Returning to the attack on 26 Feb. he called for Members who also belonged to the Company to declare their interest, and the next day urged that the patent be brought in for inspection.36 His attention then switched to (Sir) Giles Mompesson’s* patents for inns and alehouses. On 27 Feb. he was named to the committee to search for precedents which might permit the Commons to punish Mompesson, and on the following day he called for his arrest. Nominated on 5 Mar. to help draft a bill against projectors of monopolies, Glanville was also appointed to assist Thomas Crewe during Mompesson’s impeachment. He was deemed to have performed poorly on 8 Mar., reluctant to pursue the sensitive issue of the patents’ referees, who included lord chancellor Bacon. Indeed, a week later, and contrary to the mood of the House, Glanville argued that allegations of corruption against Bacon should not be formally recorded unless the Commons’ investigation substantiated them. Nevertheless, he was nominated on 24 Apr. to help draft bills to provide alternative regulation of inns and alehouses, and on 11 May to prepare for a further conference on the alehouses patent.37 In the meantime, he had chaired the monopolies bill committee, and although once again he needed to report the measure twice (20 and 26 Mar.), he had the satisfaction on 12 May of pronouncing on the manner in which the bill should be delivered to the Lords.38 By now Glanville regarded himself as an expert in this field, asserting on 7 May that the Merchant Adventurers’ privileges would be unaffected if the merchants of the Staple also exported cloth, and later in the month chairing the committee which scrutinized the Adventurers’ patent. In fact, he was becoming almost obsessive about the subject, on 24 Apr. criticizing the bill for preservation of fish fry on the grounds that it might establish a local monopoly. Similarly, during the debate on 26 May on the bill to prohibit wool exports, he warned that if only financial penalties were imposed on offenders, they might be targeted by a patentee.39

Such fixations notwithstanding, Glanville was becoming an adept Commons performer. On 26 Mar. he and Sir Peter Frescheville rose together to speak, and when Noye took offence at the Speaker’s humorous reaction, Glanville defused the situation with ‘a very modest and discreet speech’. While apparently unconcerned by the religious implications of Thomas Sheppard’s attack on the Sabbath observance bill on 16 Feb., he recognized that this ‘general invective’ had caused deep offence to the House, and called for the offender’s expulsion. Beyond the dynamics of debate, he also pondered upon the role of the Commons. Keen to see redress of grievances, he argued on 21 Feb. that Members should consider every petition of complaint submitted to them, regardless of its apparent significance. He evidently attached great importance to the successful passage of legislation. Anxious that early discussion of supply should not result in the session ending before other bills had been passed (5 and 7 Mar.), he was named on 26 Apr. to the committee to order the Commons’ agenda. News on 28 May of the imminent adjournment again spurred him into action, not least because he had not yet reported the bills on fishing tithes and wool-cards, and he sought in vain for an orderly strategy to complete as much business as possible.40

Given these concerns, it was predictable that Glanville would also take an interest in matters of privilege. Following an observation on 7 Feb. about the Gatton election, he was added the next day to the committee for privileges. He was also appointed to help consider the legality of Members swearing the oaths of supremacy and allegiance twice in the same Parliament, and to draft a bill to regulate elections (9 Feb., 10 March). In general Glanville took a high view of the Commons’ rights. One of the Members named on 23 Apr. to draft the arrest warrant for Sir John Bennet*, he insisted that the House could force sheriffs to execute it, on pain of imprisonment in the Tower: ‘and, if there be no precedent, to make a precedent’.41 Naturally he was more circumspect over relations between the Commons and the Crown. Named to the committee to frame a petition on freedom of speech (5 Feb.), he warned four days later that the first draft ventured into uncharted territory, and risked rejection. Convinced by 12 Feb. that a petition would cause offence, he instead proposed a declaratory bill; and as chairman of the committee for drafting both a petition and a bill, he reported on 15 Feb. that the safest course was actually a verbal message to the king. He was presumably relieved when the Commons chose to accept James’s vague promises on the subject. On 22 Feb. he emphasized the king’s entitlement to issue proclamations, while hoping for greater moderation in their use.42 However, like many Members, he badly misjudged the Edward Floyd affair. While speaking on 1 May in favour of the lesser penalty of whipping, he asserted that the House was fully entitled to inflict such a punishment on this subversive Catholic. When James disagreed, Glanville argued somewhat feebly that the lack of precedents for the Commons’ judgment did not absolutely preclude them taking such a step; Floyd’s actions could be construed as a grievance, which did fall within Members’ remit (2 May). Such dubious reasoning was sufficient to earn Glanville nominations to the committee to prepare for the conference on Floyd, and the subsequent joint committee of both Houses to resolve the jurisdictional dispute (5 and 8 May), but he would be careful on future occasions to base his arguments on more solid foundations.43

During the recess Francis Glanville received a knighthood, and thereafter the two brothers are clearly distinguishable in the parliamentary records. Glanville himself was no less prominent in the second sitting than he had been in the first, making 20 speeches and receiving two committee nominations. As soon as the House reassembled on 20 Nov., he urged haste with the uncompleted bill for free fishing, since Sir Ferdinando Gorges had procured an order from the Privy Council to prevent the Dartmouth fishing fleet from sailing to America. In the bill’s third reading debate on 1 Dec., Glanville made no attempt to hide his prejudices. When John Guy spoke up in support of the Newfoundland plantation, he was told firmly that whereas the fishing industry enriched the country by £120,000 p.a., a plantation was ‘only a titulary thing but bringeth no profit to the public but to private men who have gotten a patent’. The bill was passed by the Commons, but Gorges’ patent remained a concern, and on 19 Dec. Members backed Glanville’s motion that the king be requested to suspend it until Parliament resolved the issue.44 Meanwhile, Glanville had reported the bill against exactions by customs officials on 24 Nov., and although the House saw fit to order a recommital, the measure was passed for engrossing six days later after Glanville’s second report. Shortly afterwards he again defended the bill against wool exports, which had now reached its third reading. When the Commons failed to reach a verdict, Glanville decided on drastic action, and on 1 Dec. he reappeared with a new version which he and some other lawyers had just drafted. This duly received two readings on 4 Dec., but progressed no further.45

Given Glanville’s clear desire to see bills completed, he was understandably unhappy with the king’s request that the second sitting be used solely for voting supply for the Palatinate. Accordingly, on 26 Nov. he proposed a grant of one subsidy and one fifteenth, but coupled this with a short legislative programme designed to conclude Parliament’s more important business, such as the pardon and the bills on religion, monopolies and the continuance of expiring statutes. Far from adopting such a scheme, the Commons stumbled into confrontation with James over religion, foreign policy, and Goldsmith and Lepton’s conspiracy against Sir Edward Coke*. Initially Glanville trod carefully, on 3 Dec. advising that the petition about the prince’s marriage should not discuss whether Members were entitled to comment on such issues lest their statement be used against them. However, when the king instructed the House to abandon its pursuit of Goldsmith and Lepton, Glanville insisted on 11 Dec. that the inquiry fell within the Commons’ proper remit, and should continue. On the following day, with James now also digging in his heels, he agreed with Sir Robert Phelips that the king was seeking to dictate Parliament’s agenda: ‘if we now go on with this message, and proceed hereupon with bills, then next we shall have command to go on with grievances, and then with this and that bill, and then with that grievance; and so hereafter we shall do nothing, but what the king commands’.46 As the Commons began to outline a declaration of their privileges on 15 Dec., Glanville asserted that although by tradition Members requested these rights from the monarch in each Parliament, the king ‘hath not the power of refusal’. He was unimpressed by James’s next offer of concessions, observing on 17 Dec. that the House had been diverted from its intended petition on freedom of speech in February by a similar letter, and that the same problems had now recurred. He would willingly proceed with normal business, but not if it was at James’s insistence. ‘It will more content the subject to have the privileges confirmed, than all the bills, for else we can never do good here hereafter.’ Aware that the Commons risked a repeat of the 1614 Parliament’s premature dissolution, he welcomed the king’s next offer of a further sitting, urging Members on 18 Dec. to express their gratitude, since ‘enemies of this House have now an opportunity to do us mischief’. Nevertheless, he still maintained that some form of protestation was necessary to avoid a further dispute of this kind. Although not selected to draft this statement, he was appointed to help compose the suggested message of thanks to James, and on the following day to view the clerk’s book, which now included the text of the Commons’ protestation.47

Following the heated debate on 17 Dec., the king demanded to know which Members had treated his command to continue with bills as a violation of the Commons’ privileges, whereupon Sir George Calvert* hesitantly identified Glanville as one of the speakers, emphasizing that he was not ‘very factious otherwise’. Although there is no firm evidence that he was subsequently punished, Glanville alluded in April 1628 to an occasion when he and Hakewill were questioned about words spoken in the House. This was probably a reference to the Privy Council’s inquiry of January 1622 into those Members who were thought to have misbehaved themselves.48 In contrast to the Crown’s disapproval of his activities in the Commons, Glanville’s constituents appreciated his efforts, and presented him with a silver basin and ewer worth £33 17s. 6d., and engraved with a map of the town. He appears on this occasion to have waived his parliamentary wages.49 Following the dissolution, Glanville’s reputation in the west continued to grow. Now recorder of Launceston as well as of Okehampton and Plymouth, he was in demand as a mediator in local gentry disputes, though he was recorded as a Middlesex resident when he donated 20 marks towards the recovery of the Palatinate in February 1622. By the middle of the decade he could claim that ‘his practice is now as good as most men in the kingdom’.50

The 1624 Parliament saw Glanville consolidate his standing in the Commons. His recorded activity of 47 committee or conference appointments and 84 speeches compares favourably with his performance in 1621, and his influence now reached its peak. Named to the committee for privileges on 23 Feb., he assumed its chair, and in the course of 17 reports dealt with 22 disputed elections and the re-enfranchisement of four boroughs. He proved an assertive chairman, twice demanding that his reports to the House be awarded priority over other business (2 Mar., 21 Apr.), and under his leadership the committee vigorously upheld its own independence, and indirectly that of Parliament itself. On 9 Mar. Sir Thomas Edmondes, a privy councillor, attended the committee despite not being one of its members, and finding there was no seat for him requested an adjournment to a larger room. Undeterred by Edmondes’ political muscle, Glanville refused to comply and all but ordered him to withdraw, provoking a furious response for which the councillor was later obliged to apologize. Glanville’s report of 5 Mar. on the Cambridgeshire election prompted a resolution that sworn affidavits were inadmissible as evidence, since they allowed other courts such as Chancery to influence the interpretation of returns.51 On 10 Mar., debating Walter Steward’s case, he insisted that no foreigners should be admitted to the Commons until fully naturalized by Parliament; if Crown grants of denizenship were accepted as an adequate qualification, the floodgates would be opened to men who ‘will not care for the making of any laws but for their own times without respect to their posterity’. Central to the safeguarding of liberty and good governance was a broad franchise, freely exercised, and this principle was reiterated in a series of reports on boroughs such as Bletchingley, Chippenham and Winchelsea (12, 18 and 22 March). Glanville viewed parliamentary representation as a public duty. On the question of whether boroughs like Amersham or Hertford were entitled to re-enfranchisement, he produced a precedent on 6 Apr. which implied that once this privilege was granted, it should not be allowed to lapse. Essentially the same principle applied to individuals, as in the Gloucestershire election when Sir Thomas Estcourt attempted to withdraw after winning the poll. As Glanville explained in the Reports which he later wrote on the committee’s rulings in this Parliament, ‘the county and commonwealth have ... an interest in every man’ that takes precedence over their private wishes.52 He was not invariably successful in upholding these ideals. On 24 Mar. he attempted to deliver a minority report, after the bulk of the committee rejected his argument that the Norfolk returns were invalid because a poll had been demanded but not properly held. However, he did manage to strengthen the committee’s powers of investigation, securing a resolution on 23 Mar. that it could detain alleged delinquents while its hearings continued, and following his report on 29 Apr. the vicar of Bletchingley was summoned to the bar of the House for abusing a committee member. Within the same sphere of activity, he was appointed to help draft one bill on elections, and another which charged the suspect Liverpool Member, Sir Thomas Gerrard with praemunire (13 and 15 March).53

True to his principles, Glanville remained an active spokesman for his own constituents. He again chaired the committee for the bill against exactions of customs officials, which was sent for engrossing following his report on 15 May but progressed no further. He was named to the legislative committee concerned with duchy of Cornwall leases on 9 Mar. after raising the same legal loophole as in 1621, while he secured another committee nomination on 24 Mar. by observing that the bill against enclosure failed to take account of Devon’s distinctive agricultural patterns.54 On 27 Feb. he resumed his campaign against Gorges’ fishing patent, brushing aside Barnaby Gooch’s warning that the duke of Buckingham was one of its backers. His report on 5 Mar. from the subcommittee on the patent was grim, warning that besides the fishing-related problems already identified, the New England planters had the power to make their own laws, and even to punish alleged offenders living in Britain. By 15 Mar. Glanville had proof of Gorges’ efforts to enforce his patent through the Admiralty Court, and, more damning still, produced a book written by the New England Company which ‘doth charge the last Parliament with faction in questioning those patentees for their abuses’. Having won agreement that the patent was a grievance, he proceeded to steer the revived bill for free fishing through committee, though he encountered further resistance from the pro-plantation lobby when he reported the measure on 10 April. Glanville did not mince his words: ‘We have a real possession of a fishery, they have an imaginary expectation of a plantation, and they will have their imagination swallow up our reality’. The bill was recommitted, but it passed its third reading on 3 May.55

Understandably, Glanville also took a close interest in the monopolies bill, observing on 26 Feb. that its main purpose was to ensure that patents could be challenged through the Common Law, rather than solely before the Privy Council. Having chaired its committee, he reported the measure on 9 Mar., and when it finally completed its passage through the Commons four days later, he was appointed to take it up to the Lords ‘because he took pains in it’. Nominated on 7 Apr. to manage the ensuing conference, and subsequently also to help examine the patents cited in the bill (22 Apr.), his final involvement with the bill was as a member of the joint committee with the Lords to draft amendments (13 May).56 In the meantime, on 3 Mar. he preferred a new bill for ordering inns and hostelries, being named to its committee stage on 1 April. He also helped to draft and redraft a petition against a patent for the survey of seacoals, which he viewed as ‘a grievance in creation [although] never put in execution’; the text proved contentious, and he reported it three times on the same day before it was finally allowed (25-6 May).57

Glanville’s interest in legal reforms was also undiminished, not least because there was unfinished business from 1621 to attend to. On 3 Mar. he introduced a fresh bill against levying debts in the king’s name, and was named to its committee three weeks later. He also brought in a bill to facilitate the reversal of outlawries (22 Mar.), though he was omitted from the committee, perhaps because of the pressure of business in the privileges committee. Glanville took a close interest in the bills against pretences of concealments and for assignment of debts, chairing the committees for both (25 Feb., 18 Mar., 6 Apr. and 12 May), and spoke on a number of other such measures, including the bill for probate of suggestions in cases of prohibition (23 February). He was particularly scathing on 8 Mar. on the subject of secret offices, dismissing out of hand a proposal that the Court of Wards might do more to advertise its formal inquiries; such notices would actually ‘do more hurt, in countenancing these secret inquisitions, than good to the subject’, and the appropriate action was to abolish the practice entirely.58 Glanville was also becoming concerned at the Crown’s tax innovations. Named on 9 Mar. to the committee to inquire into the new impositions on wine, sugar and groceries, he added a detail to Sir Edwin Sandys’s report on 12 Apr., revealing one of the underhand tactics employed by lord treasurer Middlesex (Sir Lionel Cranfield*) in support of these levies. Initially uncertain how to react to Edmund Nicholson’s patent for the pretermitted custom, he was appointed on 5 May to help collate the Commons’ objections to it, and on 19 May to examine the grant itself.59

Glanville was rarely vocal on ecclesiastical affairs. He called on 6 Apr. for more efficient enforcement of the recusancy laws, and was appointed to help draft charges against the Arminian Bishop Harsnett of Norwich (15 May), but his only recorded comment on the Sabbath observance bill concerned voting procedure (24 February).60 This lack of religious fervour may help to explain his initially muted reaction to the drive for war with Spain. On 2 Mar. he merely expounded on the practical arrangements necessary if a joint committee of both Houses was established to prepare a petition to the king about the Spanish treaties. Glanville was deeply troubled by the efforts of the war party to secure a firm promise of military funding before James had clearly indicated his intentions. As he observed on 5 Mar., ‘to provide for war before it be propounded to us is to christen a child before it was born’. Mindful of 1621, he warned that to presume too much about the treaties’ future risked another confrontation over freedom of speech, and he urged that the petition include a caveat that the Commons did not seek to pre-empt the king’s own decision.61 By 11 Mar. he was willing to back a promise of financial support in general terms, though ironically his proposal that Members also affirm the lawfulness of the proposed conflict was slapped down as overly presumptuous by solicitor-general Heath. Glanville was appointed the same day to attend the conference about the country’s readiness for war, and also to draft the Commons’ non-specific declaration of support in the event of a breach with Spain. As the probability of military action increased, his attitude shifted. On 19 Mar., asserting that it was better to ‘fall into the arms of England than Spain’, he called for a grant of whatever supply was needed, with a down-payment of four subsidies and eight fifteenths, but in return he wanted more time for legislation, including a separate session free from discussion of supply. Neither proposal was well-received, Sir Thomas Belasyse sourly noting that ‘subsidies come not in so easily as fees’, and the following day Glanville fell in line with the consensus view, while warning Members that they had only themselves to blame if the smaller grant now agreed proved too little to generate the desired breach.62 Thereafter, he showed little interest in the subject. Glanville also largely steered clear of the attack on lord treasurer Middlesex, though he urged on 9 Apr. that the earl be allowed to defend himself, not least because the Commons would strengthen their case against him by hearing both sides. At this juncture he was much more concerned about legislative matters, not least the bill for the continuance of expiring statutes, which he was helping to prepare. The Crown’s view was that the 1621 session had not been a proper Parliament, so that expiring statutes were unaffected by its premature dissolution. Glanville begged to differ, and on 10 Apr. he helped to insert a clause into the continuance bill to revive legislation which in his opinion had been allowed to lapse then. He was also appointed on 22 May to the conference to address the Lords’ concerns about the bill.63

The 1625 Parliament found Glanville quite busy still, with a tally of 11 speeches to his name, and appointments to a conference and 16 committees, but in terms of business generally he was a more peripheral figure. Although again appointed to the committee for privileges, he surrendered the chair to Sir George More, and contented himself with two observations on the Yorkshire election dispute, referring back to precedents from 1624 on the proper conduct of polls (4-5 July).64 More involved than usual with ecclesiastical matters, he was named to four bill committees on such topics as recusancy and benefit of clergy, and was also appointed to help draft and deliver the petition to the king on religion.65 Otherwise he pursued his customary priorities, chairing legislative committees concerned with the regulation of inns and free fishing in America, and securing a place on the committee for the wool exports bill (27 and 29-30 June). Glanville reported the petty larceny bill on 9 July, ‘so much altered, as newly written’, and similarly found fault with the continuance of statutes legislation, which required further amendment before it passed (6 July). Unhappy at the prospect of an extended recess, on 7 July he opposed the measure to continue the session beyond the granting of the royal assent to some bills. Appointed the following day to the conference on the plight of the plague-threatened inmates of the Fleet, he took the precaution himself shortly afterwards of dispersing his family across four counties to combat the risk of infection.66

From Glanville’s perspective the Oxford sitting proved thoroughly unsatisfactory. Although able to report the wool exports bill on 8 Aug., the redrafted petty larceny measure, whose committee he chaired, failed to progress. On 10 Aug. he delivered a petition announcing that military preparations in Ireland were at a standstill since the treasurers at war had blocked the release of funds, blaming restrictions imposed by the Commons. One day later he complained bitterly that the royal ships guarding the English coast against pirates were merely ‘going up and down feasting in every good port’. Not surprisingly, he was sceptical about the government’s request for additional supply, arguing on 10 Aug. that such small sums could easily be raised on credit, and that Parliament itself would be diminished by the granting of such a paltry amount. Indeed, if supply could be obtained only by a vote, rather than by a general consensus, this would be seen as dishonouring the king, and a written undertaking to provide adequate resources in due course would actually be more valuable. Two days later, news of the impending dissolution spurred him to draft just such a declaration, asserting the Commons’ willingness to vote taxation, but also emphasizing Parliament’s role in the redress of grievances. This protestation had barely been passed when the session was brought to an abrupt end.67

As Sir John Eliot ironically observed in his Negotium Posterorum, Glanville did not have long to wait to experience the Crown’s gratitude for taking this stand. Attending the king at Plymouth that September in his capacity as recorder, he found himself pressed for service as secretary on the expedition to Cadiz, despite pleading that his handwriting was ‘so bad that hardly any but his own clerk can read it’, and that his family depended on his legal earnings. This vindictive appointment would later be blamed on Buckingham, whom Walter Long* believed had taken his revenge after hearing reports of the complaint on 11 Aug. 1625 about coastal patrols. However, Glanville himself insisted in 1626 that the duke had ‘mediated with the king for his stay’.68 The post was said to be worth £400, but the potential danger was considerable, and in October one observer noted that ‘poor Mrs. Glanville is the most dejected creature that ever was for her husband’. In the event, as Glanville’s account of the Voyage to Cadiz reveals, his official duties detained him safely on board ship almost throughout the expedition, though on 27 Oct. he helped to organize a bombardment of Spanish forces at Puntal. After landing at Kinsale, Ireland in early December, he travelled to Lismore to spend Christmas with one of his clients, the earl of Cork. There, he fell so ill that he was unable to travel until late February 1626, finally reaching London on 5 March.69

In his absence Glanville was again elected to Parliament for Plymouth, but he missed the first four weeks of the new session. Once back at Westminster he failed to give the Commons his undivided attention, spending 9 and 11 Mar. in the Lords as counsel to the 18th earl of Oxford, and slipping away to Westminster Hall once Easter term began in late April, doubtless anxious to make up for the lost earnings of recent months.70 These attendance lapses, combined with some residual physical weakness, help to explain his less prominent performance, which amounted in this Parliament to 42 recorded speeches, and 18 appointments to committees or conferences, although another crucial factor was the changing character of the Commons’ business. While nominated to a handful of committees on customary themes such as reform of alehouses and procedures in the equity courts (25 and 27 Mar.), Glanville initially seemed reluctant to participate in the attack on Buckingham, to which the House devoted so much of its time. However, given his recent service at Cadiz, to which Sir John Eliot alluded on 27 Mar., he could scarcely avoid being drawn into discussion of the war, and his first committee appointment was to consider a petition from one of that expedition’s victuallers (8 March). This was followed by further nominations on 14 and 22 Mar. to help draft bills for finding arms and raising mariners’ wages. In the meantime he chaired the committee for drafting a message to the Lords on how to resolve the military crisis, which he reported to the House on 10 March. He had possibly still not entirely recovered his health, and on 27 Mar. had to withdraw from chairing the debate on supply due to illness.71

The turning point for Glanville was probably the king’s attempt to silence the attacks on Buckingham by Clement Coke and Samuel Turner*. On 1 Apr. he recommended a Remonstrance to Charles, justifying the Commons’ recent behaviour, and finally displayed some of his old defiance: ‘kings will stand high upon their honours, we stiff upon our privileges’. His proposal was adopted, and having chaired the drafting committee he reported the text to the House three days later. However, he then retreated to the sidelines for another fortnight. Sir Dudley Digges’s proposal for a joint-stock Company to finance a private war with Spain briefly aroused his interest, but his comments on 14 Apr. were restricted to the Company’s legal status and the Crown’s claims on its potential profits.72 During this period Glanville made no recorded comments at all on Buckingham, but he must have engaged in some dialogue with the duke’s opponents, for on 21 Apr. he was unexpectedly named to the committee to draw together the charges being levelled against the favourite. He reported from this committee four times, securing agreement for a prosecution based on common fame, and notifying Members of the proposed charges about Buckingham’s accumulation of offices and his involvement in James I’s death (21-2 and 27 Apr., 2 May). Significantly, on 24 Apr. he also defended the use of a small committee to conduct this explosive inquiry, and five days later moved for a vote of thanks after the king conceded that the duke’s impeachment could go ahead. However, his attempt to clear the Cornish Lord Robartes of buying his peerage from Buckingham backfired when both Sir Robert Pye and Sir William Strode disputed his interpretation of events (6 May).73 Glanville was initially appointed on 3 May to attend the impeachment hearings merely as an assistant to Sir Walter Earle, but when the latter withdrew he took responsibility for the charges about extorting £10,000 from the East India Company and delivering ships to France for use against La Rochelle (6 May). Following the arrest of Digges and Eliot in the aftermath of the impeachment conference, he concurred on 13 May with the popular strategy of denying that the former had uttered the words which so offended the king, and chaired the committee to prepare for a conference on the detentions. However, on 19 May he tried unsuccessfully to excuse himself from presenting the Commons’ views to the Lords, and was presumably relieved when the conference was abandoned in the light of subsequent developments.74

Possibly sensing that the campaign against Buckingham had failed, Glanville now again retreated into the background. Like most Members he reacted with alarm on 3 June to John More II’s ill-judged remarks about tyrannical government, calling for their author to be sequestered and sent to the Tower. Four days later he advised the House not to get involved in Philip Burlamachi’s efforts to recover money owed to him by the government, as this was a matter for the treasurers of war. On 8 June he was named to the committee to frame the heads of the proposed Remonstrance against the unparliamentary collection of Tunnage and Poundage, but he was in no hurry to return to centre stage. Deeply worried to find that his enforced visit to Cadiz had been included as a grievance in the Remonstrance against Buckingham, he tried in vain on 12 June to dissuade Members from mentioning him. However, his assertions that ‘the duke mediated with the king for his stay’ and ‘that he never declared himself against the duke’ lacked conviction, and the clause stayed in. On the following day he headed the committee list for the bill about parliamentary privilege, a measure which he had indirectly promoted three weeks earlier. Following Parliament’s dissolution, he was summoned before attorney-general Heath along with the other managers of the impeachment conference, but like them he refused to divulge further details of the evidence gathered against Buckingham, and emerged unscathed.75

Glanville apparently missed the first three weeks of the 1628 Parliament, failing to feature in its records until the second week of April. Nevertheless, he thereafter emerged as one of the more prominent Commons’ figures in the first session, making 32 speeches, and attracting nominations to 23 committees and 12 conferences. The time devoted by the House to subjects’ liberties left little space for other business, but he chaired yet another bill committee concerned with free fishing in America, this time targeting Newfoundland rather than New England (23 Apr.), and condemned on a legal technicality Sir Thomas Monson’s* patent for making bills in the Council in the North. More active than usual on private legislation, he chaired the committee stage of the bill concerning the estates of the 2nd earl of Devonshire (Sir William Cavendish I*), which he reported three times before it finally passed (10 May, 2 June). He also secured nominations to the legislative committees concerning the restitution of Carew Ralegh† and the acquisition of Ralegh property by the earl of Bristol (Sir John Digby*), his client the earl of Cork having an interest in the outcome of both measures (23 May, 4 June).76 Absent during the opening stages of the inquiry into the Cornish shire election, Glanville was appointed on 21 Apr. to help consider the contempt of the principal offenders in ignoring their summons to Westminster, and on 13 May to draft their formal apology. As an authority on parliamentary privilege he affirmed on 10 Apr. that the Commons could adjourn itself regardless of the king’s wishes, and helped to secure the rejection on 22 Apr. of the electoral reform bill, stating that it was superfluous given Members’ existing powers to judge elections.77

Although a latecomer to the debates on subjects’ liberties, Glanville soon made his presence felt through the clarity of his thought and firm constitutional convictions. Appointed on 17 Apr. to help double-check the precedents already deployed by John Selden, on the same day he opposed the Lords’ request to see the Commons’ record of a 1621 bill to explain Magna Carta, arguing that the Journal might misrepresent the original debates. Named to the conferences on liberties on 16-17 and 23 Apr., he insisted that the king’s prerogative could not be allowed a totally free rein in areas where subjects might suffer through its misuse (17 April).78 Now satisfied that there was general agreement over the illegality of arbitrary taxation and imprisonment, he seconded Eliot’s proposal on 28 Apr. for a bill of liberties: ‘I find no cause to recede from our resolutions, and I desire no bill be framed that may favour of a departure from them’. He was duly nominated to the drafting committee, but his optimism about the ease with which such a measure could be prepared was misplaced. On 3 May, with Charles now demanding to know whether the Commons would accept his own assurances about the prerogative, Glanville threw his support behind an alternative plan for a bill to explain Magna Carta, and chaired the committee which drafted a message to the king about this.79 When Charles emphatically rejected any explanatory element, Glanville on 6 May adopted Sir Edward Coke’s alternative strategy: ‘commissions and instructions went out against the law; ... let us seek relief against this, and let us vote them to be a grievance, and let us frame a petition of right, ... [for] without redress thereof we cannot go with comfort to our country’. With many soldiers still billeted in the Plymouth region, he was deeply concerned by the implementation of martial law, and alluded on 7 May to its local abuse. The draft Petition, as reported by him the same day, did not address this problem, but John Selden almost immediately corrected this omission with an additional section.80 Glanville helped to examine the complete text before it was sent up to the Lords, and he was appointed to successive conferences during the next fortnight as the peers sought concessions over the Petition’s wording. While prepared to accept the phrase ‘not warrantable’ in place of ‘unlawful’ for the oath administered in connection with the Forced Loan (20 May), he emphatically rejected the Lords’ additional clause ‘saving’ the king’s sovereign power. As he explained on 22 May:

it was objected that the prerogative in general was not let loose, but only that that is for the good of the people; ...This is a door unto the breach of all statutes and laws. It opens a way to interpretation, as if for the safety and good of the people that laws may be laid aside ... It is not safe to acknowledge a power that is above the law for the safety of the realm.

Impressed by this reasoning, the Commons sent Glanville back to the Lords the following day, where he stated bluntly that the saving clause ‘would take away the effect of every part of this petition, and become destructive of the whole’. Sovereign power was indeed entrusted to the king, but not for his unfettered use; so far as such cornerstones of freedom as Magna Carta were concerned, ‘there is no trust reposed in the king’s sovereign power ... to enable him to dispense with them, or to take from his subjects that birthright and inheritance which they have in their liberties’. The Lords were sufficiently impressed by this resolute stance to suggest a joint committee of both Houses to thrash out remaining problems, and Glanville reported this development to the Commons on 24 May. In the event, the peers shortly afterwards accepted the Petition unchanged, and Glanville was subsequently appointed to help arrange its presentation to the king and its enrolment in the Westminster courts (27 May and 13 June).81 He could now turn his attention to other matters, and was named on 7 June to help draft the subsidy bill’s preamble, and on 13 June to consider how to make better progress with the Tunnage and Poundage bill. On 17 June he warned against making concessions to the Lords over the subsidy preamble’s wording, since supply was not only the Commons’ preserve, but also their only means of leverage over the king. However, he still clung to the conventional wisdom that under normal circumstances the monarch could do no wrong, and on 20 June insisted that Charles could not have instructed Sir Edmund Sawyer* to revise the book of rates: ‘our law says the king’s command contrary to law is void, and the actor stands single. If there were a command, it was upon misinformation’.82

After the intense activity which marked the Petition of Right’s passage, Glanville found relatively little to do in the 1629 session, making just seven speeches and receiving nominations to six committees. Two of the latter concerned bills against recusants and the procurement of judicial posts by bribery (23 and 28 January). He took no recorded part in either the opening discussions on Tunnage and Poundage or the religious debates of early February. Selden’s proposal on 12 Feb. for a message to the Exchequer barons as a means of recovering the merchandise confiscated from John Rolle* finally stirred Glanville into life. Convinced in his own mind that these goods could not really have been seized in payment of Tunnage and Poundage, given that Parliament had still not made the necessary grant to the king, he was certain that the judges would agree to release them once the legal confusion had been explained to them. Moreover, since the collection of unparliamentary Tunnage and Poundage represented a further assault on subjects’ liberties, there should be no progress with the much-delayed bill until redress had been secured. Glanville may have been named to help draft the message to the Exchequer, and was certainly appointed on 14 Feb. to consider the barons’ unyielding response.83

The matter now rested on the hair-splitting issue of whether the king or the customs farmers received the benefit of the confiscated goods. Glanville, who was added on 20 Feb. to the subcommittee to examine the customers, considered not only that they did have a personal interest, but that they were technically trespassers, as the king should not yet have awarded them a contract for collecting Tunnage and Poundage. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to allow Sir Humphrey May to produce warrants which allegedly proved that Charles had authorized the seizure of the disputed merchandise, insisting that if this drew Members into ‘a dispute of the king’s prerogative, those that called for the warrants were the causers of it’ (21 February). Two days later he supported the decision to award Rolle parliamentary privilege in his goods, and to proceed against the customers as delinquents. Accordingly, his hopes of a legalistic solution to the impasse were utterly dashed by the news that Charles had taken full responsibility for the customers’ actions, and he was reduced to muttering darkly of conspiracy: ‘this cometh from the enemies of religion’.84

Glanville was now comparatively wealthy, and had acquired the country estate of Broad Hinton in 1628. Appointed recorder of Bristol in 1630, he was also active as counsel on the Western circuit. In 1633 his reversion of the prothonotaryship of Chancery fell in, though he resigned the post after three years. Nevertheless, he was regarded with suspicion by the Crown. Not until 1637, when the queen, Archbishop Laud and the earl of Holland intervened on his behalf, did Charles finally consent to make him a serjeant-at-law.85 Having ‘engaged to be a better servant to the king than formerly’, he was chosen as Speaker of the Short Parliament, and was promoted to king’s serjeant shortly afterwards, receiving a knighthood in the following year. Elected to the Long Parliament in June 1642, he defected to the king a year later, and travelled the Western circuit in his cause, though there is no evidence that he attended the Oxford Parliament. In mid 1644 he returned voluntarily to London, where he was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower for two years and nine months. He staved off the threat of impeachment, but in 1648 was fined £2,320 for his delinquency, reducing this sum to £970 by surrendering a Devon rectory for the upkeep of the ministry. Glanville was elected to the Commons one final time in 1659, but was almost immediately ejected as ‘not qualified to sit in this House’.86 He was restored to his offices at the Restoration, but died in October 1661. In accordance with his wish for a ‘speedy, private, decent and most frugal Christian burial’, he was interred at Broad Hinton, where his widow erected a monument to his memory 12 years later. None of his descendants sat in Parliament.87